How to experience the Apollo 11 mission as it happened, no time or space travel required

Katey Psencik, GateHouse Media

Tuesday

Jul 16, 2019 at 10:55 AM

Fifty years ago this week, the Apollo 11 mission took off for the moon. And you can watch it unfold in real time, thanks to a NASA historian.

NASA software engineer and historian Ben Feist created Apollo in Real Time, a website that promises just that: the opportunity to watch the mission to the moon unfold just as it did 50 years ago.

The website includes "all film footage, TV broadcasts, photographs, every word spoken, and more, including 11,000 hours of Mission Control audio never before made publicly available."

QUIZ: Test your Apollo 11 knowledge

Here's how it works: Once you land on the Apollo in Real Time homepage, you can select to start your experience one minute before the mission's launch, or you can drop in to exactly what was happening 50 years ago, to the second. Once you start the experience, you'll see updates on the mission status, a transcript of the crew's conversations, video of crew members and mission control, mission milestones, views of the Earth from space and more. You can also jump around to listen to different positions in mission control, or you can skip ahead to witness specific milestones from the mission.

Here are some key dates and times, if you want to plan when to tune in:

Feist called the experience "rewarding," telling CollectSpace, "If I had my way, all of humanity would take a moment out of their busy lives, tune in and marvel at the scale of what humanity can achieve when we all work together."

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